‘French Carbon Tax Anger Shape Of Things To Come Globally As Costs Bite’
In this newsletter:
1) Panic Grips Élysée Palace As Carbon Tax Revolt Grows
The Times, 6 December 2018
2) Carbon Tax Revolt Escalates As French Police Union Joins Yellow Vests
Sud-Quest, 6 December 2018
3) John Constable: ‘French Carbon Tax Anger Shape Of Things To Come Globally As Costs Bite’
Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 5 December 2018
4) France’s Protesters Are Part Of A Global Backlash Against Climate-Change Taxes
The Washington Post, 4 December 2018
5) France’s Carbon Tax Retreat Dismays COP24 Climate Talks
Politico, 5 December 2018
6) Memo To Congress: French Riots Show Why U.S. Carbon Tax Should Be A Non-Starter
Investor’s Business Daily, 4 December 2018
Full details:
1) Panic Grips Élysée Palace As Carbon Tax Revolt Grows
The Times, 6 December 2018
President Macron beat a retreat for the second time in two days as farmers, lorry drivers and students joined the tax revolt that is threatening to derail his presidency.
After announcing a six-month freeze on fuel duties on Tuesday in an attempt to appease popular anger, Mr Macron backtracked again last night and scrapped next year’s rises altogether.
The climbdown was a further humiliation for his government, which had repeatedly ruled out abandoning the planned fuel tax rises which prompted the yellow-vest movement.
In a sign of the panic besetting his presidency, Mr Macron urged opposition parties, business leaders and unions to join him in an appeal for calm. “We have reasons to fear major violence,” a source at the presidential palace told the AFP news agency.
Mr Macron told a cabinet meeting that some followers of the yellow-vest movement — so called because of the high-visibility vests worn by protesters — wanted to attack not only his presidency but also the entire state apparatus. The message was driven home by Édouard Philippe, the prime minister, who told parliament:
“What is at stake is the security of the French people and our institutions.”
His words betrayed concern in Paris that extremists on the left and right are seeking to exploit the anti-fuel tax movement to provoke a revolution.
The nervousness within government was underlined when several ministers urged Mr Macron to reverse tax cuts for the wealthy, which he introduced last year to encourage investment in France and lure financial institutions from the City of London after Brexit.
Commentators claimed that the cabinet was tempted to scrap the president’s entire reform agenda in the hope of appeasing his detractors.
Calls grew for Mr Macron to retreat after Mr Philippe announced that the government would suspend a 5 per cent rise in fuel tax for six months, scrap imminent increases in electricity and gas prices, and slash the cost of an MoT-style vehicle test.
The climbdown was met with disdain and failed to stop protesters from blocking roads across the country yesterday.
Protesters said that they wanted the government to ditch the fuel duty rises altogether rather than just suspend them. The prime minister promptly stood up in parliament to say that he would do just that “if we can’t find a good solution”, suggesting capitulation.
Full story
2) Carbon Tax Revolt Escalates As French Police Union Joins Yellow Vests
Sud-Quest, 6 December 2018
The police union has called for an unlimited strike in solidarity with the Yellow Vests movement.
“Our upper echelons still want to send us to take the blows in its place and instead of the government.” It is with these words that the police union Vigi explains its decision to call for an indefinite strike as of Saturday 8 December. Union leaders have chosen to ally with the Yellow Vests movement.
“It is time to organise legally and to be in solidarity with them, for the benefit of all,” the union said in a statement. …
The strike notice does not apply to all police officers ( some of whom do not have the right to strike ) but to administrative and technical support staff. Nevertheless, “without the technical assistants the French riot squad (CRS) could be immobilized, services could be closed, and without police the maintenance of buildings and vehicles can no longer be done”, the union warned.
Full story (in French)
3) John Constable: ‘French Carbon Tax Anger Shape Of Things To Come Globally As Costs Bite’
Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 5 December 2018
“Broadly speaking, I would judge that French popular anger is the shape of things to come globally, as climate policies begin to move into more difficult sectors,” GWPF energy editor John Constable said.
The French love a good riot, but the political backlash to the French government’s plans to increase carbon taxes on fuel could be a harbinger of what’s to come in countries committed to the global warming crusade.
Calls from the United Nations and environmentalists for the world to “do more” to stem projected global warming might run up against economic realities. But France could be a taste of what’s to come if more governments try to tax carbon dioxide emissions.
“In some senses the French are ahead of the rest of the world on this,” said John Constable, energy editor at the Global Warming Policy Forum, a U.K.-based think tank.
Constable told The Daily Caller News Foundation because of France’s heavy reliance on emissions-free nuclear power, the government has to look beyond power plants to achieve its global warming goals.
Macron raised fuel taxes already in 2018 to cut down on oil demand, but it’s hard for working-class people to sacrifice their livelihoods for speculative climate benefits in the future.
“France is now heading into the zone where the marginal cost of emissions reduction begins to increase sharply,” Constable said. “They’ve done the easy bit, electricity, and are now beginning to coerce the more difficult sectors such as transport, which of course is already heavily taxed.”
Carbon taxes on diesel and gasoline were set to take effect in January. French President Emmanuel Macron agreed to delay implementing the taxes for six months in the face of protests, but that might not be enough to satisfy demonstrators.
“The extra burden imposed by Mr. Macron has caused something to snap, not demand but the temper of the people,” Constable said.
“Broadly speaking, I would judge that French popular anger is the shape of things to come globally, as climate policies begin to move into more difficult sectors,” Constable said.
France is only the latest country to reject new carbon taxes. Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his conservative coalition were swept into power by Canadian voters in June on a platform that opposed carbon taxes.
Washington voters rejected a ballot measure in November to tax carbon dioxide emissions from industrial sources in their state. It’s the second time Washington voters rejected a carbon tax ballot initiative.
Australian lawmakers voted to repeal their country’s carbon tax in 2014. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott led his conservative party to victory in the previous year’s elections on the promise to repeal the carbon tax.
However, France’s violent reaction to new carbon taxes is part of the country’s “romantic” view of political uprisings, according to an expert on French politics and history.
“In France the governments understand only violence, and since 1789, people have a romantic approach to ‘Revolution,’” George Chabert, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, told TheDCNF. “Apparently, it is working this time as well.”
Carbon taxes were the breaking point for the thousands of gilet jaunes, or “yellow vests,” who took to the streets in late November. But the protests, considered the worst to hit Paris in 50 years, were also fueled by years of pent-up resentment against Macron’s policies.
“Since Macron came to power, he has cut taxes for the rich, ‘simplified’ the Work Laws, cut on pensions, and added billions of euros of new taxes to the working class and middle class,” Chabert said.
“The new ‘ecological’ taxes, most of which was to be used in anything but ecology, are just one more,” Chabert said. “Many new taxes are programmed to come in effect until 2020.”
Many protesters also called on Macron to resign. Yellow vests say Macron is out of touch and centralizing power at the expense of working class citizens.
“Emmanuel Macron is a little boy who has always been told he’s the best, he’s always been idolised. He’s never been told ‘you shouldn’t do that’. The guy thinks he’s God!” Claudio, a 47-year-old Frenchman, told AFP.
Full story
4) France’s Protesters Are Part Of A Global Backlash Against Climate-Change Taxes
The Washington Post, 4 December 2018
Macron is hardly alone in his frustration. Leaders in the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere have found their carbon pricing efforts running into fierce opposition.
On Tuesday, France delayed for six months a plan to raise already steep taxes on diesel fuel by 24 cents a gallon and gasoline by about 12 cents a gallon. Macron argued that the taxes were needed to curb climate change by weaning motorists off petroleum products, but violent demonstrations in the streets of Paris and other French cities forced him to backtrack — at least for now.
“No tax is worth putting in danger the unity of the nation,” said Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who was trotted out to announce the concession.
It was a setback for the French president, who has been trying to carry the torch of climate action in the wake of the Paris accords of December 2015. “When we talk about the actions of the nation in response to the challenges of climate change, we have to say that we have done little,” he said last week.
Macron is hardly alone in his frustration. Leaders in the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere have found their carbon pricing efforts running into fierce opposition. But the French reversal was particularly disheartening for climate-policy experts, because it came just as delegates from around the world were gathering in Katowice, Poland, for a major conference designed to advance climate measures.
“Like everywhere else, the question in France is how to find a way of combining ecology and equality,” said Bruno Cautrès, a researcher at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. “Citizens mostly see punitive public policies when it comes to the environment: taxes, more taxes and more taxes after that. No one has the solution, and we can only see the disaster that’s just occurred in France on this question.”
“Higher taxes on energy have always been a hard sell, politically,” said N. Gregory Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard University and advocate of carbon taxes. “The members of the American Economic Association are convinced of their virtue. But the median citizen is not.”
Full post
5) France’s Carbon Tax Retreat Dismays COP24 Climate Talks
Politico, 5 December 2018
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